The Fireman (64 page)

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

24

Late the next morning the small party of pilgrims came around a bend and drifted to a shuffling, weary halt.

What stopped them initially was a shock of color. On the left side of the road was the sort of scenery they were used to: blasted trees and a long slope of burnt sticks and ruin. But on the right was a gray-green forest of pine. The branches of the firs were caked in ash, but the trees beneath were healthy, undamaged, and the grass growing below them was rich and lush. Through the evergreens they saw a gleam of black water.

A billboard stood on the green side of the road. Originally it had featured an ad for GEICO insurance. A dainty little gecko suggested that fifteen minutes or less could save a buck or two. Spray-painted directly under this helpful suggestion was a message in black:

NEW MAINE FREE ZONE

INFECTED TAKE GLOVES + COAT

STAY ON ROAD CONTINUE NORTH

TO MACHIAS FOR MARTHA QUINN ISLE

INFECTED WEAR ORANGE SAFETY GARMENTS AT ALL TIME!

An elderly pickup was parked alongside the billboard. The flatbed contained milk cartons crammed with bright orange work gloves. A pile of orange rain slickers had been heaped beside them. Nick climbed up to root around, lifted one of the slickers, and turned it so they could see.

A biohazard symbol had been stenciled on the back in black.

“What now?” Renée asked.

“Looks like we get dressed,” Harper said. “Will you be a hon and find me a coat? I don’t want to try and climb up there.”

Ten minutes later they walked on, all of them in the orange slickers and orange gloves that marked them as sick. They hadn’t tried to pull a coat on the Fireman, had only tossed one over his chest.

The pond they had glimpsed through the trees turned out to be a nasty body of water indeed. Masses of dead fish rotted on the stones at the edge of the water, and the shallows were hidden beneath a floating blanket of ash, although the center of the little pool was clear and black. There were a few undamaged and empty cottages built alongside the water, from the days before there were setback rules on construction. Notices had been nailed to the front doors, above more black biohazard symbols.

“Hang on,” Harper said and left them in the road.

She climbed the steps of the first cottage and read the notice.

This house has been designated a temporary overnight shelter for those infected with Draco Incendia Trychophyton a/k/a Dragonscale. If you are healthy DO NOT ENTER.

Do NOT drink the water or use the toilets. There is bottled water in the fridge and canned goods. Do NOT take more than you need. There is ABSOLUTELY no squatting. Visitors must depart within 12 hours. This residence IS monitored by local Law Enforcement.

Wear your orange safety garments at all time. Infected found not wearing clothing that marks them as sick will be considered hostile and
MAY BE SHOT
.

You are 131 miles from Machias, where you may be provided with transport to the Free Wolf Island D.I.T. Care Unit. Our prayers are with you.

“What’s it say?” Allie shouted.

“It says we can stay here overnight if we need to,” Harper said, but she already knew they weren’t going to. It was too early in the day to stop.

She let herself in, pushing back the door and stepping into the front hall. The cottage had a pipe-smoke and dusty book smell that Harper associated with the aged. The phone on the wall had a rotary dial.

Harper found her way to a kitchen with a view of the pond. A 1950s-era Coldspot refrigerator the color of a banana milk shake stood against one wall. A picture of Smokey the Bear in a rustic wooden frame hung next to the back screen door.
only you can prevent forest fires
.

The light switches didn’t work. She peeked into the fridge and found pallets of room-temperature bottled water. The bathroom was as dark as a closet, and Harper had to fumble around for a while before she found the catch on the medicine cabinet.

When she came out of the lake house five minutes later, Harper had a case of water under her left arm and a bottle of Bayer aspirin in her right hand. She squatted on the flagstone path and used a rock to crush four aspirin tablets into a fine powder. She spoonfed the smashed pills to John, mixed in with little sips of water.

“Will that make him better?” Allie asked.

“It’ll bring down his fever,” Harper said.
For a while,
she thought. If they didn’t get antibiotics into him soon, all the aspirin in the world wouldn’t keep his infected respiratory system going. He’d suffocate on his own fluids.

“Chim chim cher-ee,”
John muttered.
“Chim chim cher-uck. Here comes Jakob in his truck. Chim chim cher-ee, chim chim cher-all. Desolation’s plow sweeps away all
.
”

Harper kissed his sweaty, damp cheek, stood, and nodded to Allie. Allie bent and took the handles of the ladder.

“Let’s go,” Harper said.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

25

They left the lake behind and soon crossed back into another burn zone. Low clouds of smoke smothered the sky, and they were hot and sticky in their slickers. A wind came in spasms, blowing grit. Harper had ash in her mouth, ash in her eyes. Allie collected ash in her long eyelashes and eyebrows and short bristly hair. With her pink, dust-irritated eyes, she very much looked like an albino. When they stopped to rest, Harper took John’s pulse. It was shallow and erratic. She crushed four more aspirin and force-fed them to him.

Late in the afternoon they came over a hill and looked down into more green, and this time it was on both sides of the road. On the right were swaying evergreens. On the left was a meadow of russet straw, bordered by blueberry bushes that were months from bearing fruit. A mile away they saw a white farmhouse, a barn, a gleaming steel silo.

As they neared the farmhouse, Harper saw a woman standing in the dooryard, shading her eyes with one hand and peering back at them. A screen door slapped shut. A dog barked.

They arrived at a fence of stripped, shining logs, with the farm buildings on the other side. A black retriever ran back and forth on a chain, flinging himself in their general direction and barking without cessation. His eyes shone with a jolly lunacy.

A white bedsheet hung over the fence, one corner flapping in the breeze. Words had been written on it in Sharpie.

WE ARE HEALTHY. PLEASE GO ON. MACHIAS, 126 MI.

GOD LOVE AND KEEP YOU. HELP AHEAD.

“These fucking people,” Allie whispered.

“These fucking people might have children,” Harper said. “And maybe they don’t want them to burn to death.”

“Burn to death!” John Rookwood shouted, cawing like a crow. He began to hack, a dry, wrenching cough, twisting violently on his stretcher.

The woman continued to watch them from her front step. She looked like she had walked out of another century, in her ankle-length dress and blue denim blouse, a kerchief holding back her graying brown hair.

Paper cups had been set along the fencepost. They contained what looked like orange Gatorade.

Nick picked it up, sniffed at it, glanced at Harper for permission. She nodded that it was all right to drink.

“What if it’s poison?” Allie asked.

“There’s easier ways to kill us,” Harper said. “They could just shoot us. Who wants to bet that man watching from the second floor has a gun?”

Allie darted a surprised look back at the farmhouse. A lantern-jawed man with raven-black hair—graying at the temples, swept back from his high brow—regarded them from a window above and to the right of the front door. His gaze was dispassionate and unblinking. Sniper eyes.

The woman watched them drink but didn’t speak. Harper thought the orange stuff might be Tang. Whatever it was, it was sweet and clean and made her feel almost human.

“Thank you,” Harper said.

The woman nodded.

Harper was about to go on, then paused and leaned over the fence. “Our friend is sick.
Very
sick. He needs antibiotics. Do you have antibiotics?”

The woman’s forehead wrinkled in thought. She looked at the Fireman, strapped to the travois, and back at Harper. She took a step toward the fence and opened her mouth to speak and the window on the second floor banged open.

“Keep walkin’,” the man called, and Harper was right. He had a rifle, although he didn’t point it at them, just cradled it to his chest. “You take one step our side of the fence, you won’t take another. There’s a place for people like you up north.”

“One of them is sick,” the woman called up.

Her husband laughed. “All of them is sick.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

26

All through the following morning, Harper was conscious of being observed, sometimes surreptitiously, sometimes openly. An old man in a wifebeater glared at them from behind the screen door of his cottage. Three small and nearly identical boys with running noses studied them from the window of their ranch house. Nick waved. They didn’t wave back.

Another time, a black car followed them, hanging about a quarter mile back, gravel grinding under its tires. It stopped when they stopped, and when they proceeded it rolled on in their wake. Four men in it, two in front, two in back, men in flannel hunting coats and porkpie hats.

“I think they have guns,” Renée said. “Do you think we’re safe? No, don’t answer that. They say there’s no such thing as a stupid question, but I believe that qualifies. We haven’t been safe in months.”

The black car kept pace with them for over an hour before suddenly accelerating, then lurching off the highway onto a narrow side road, tires throwing stones. One of the passengers hurled an empty beer can out the window, but Harper wasn’t sure he was aiming it at them. She didn’t see any weapons, but as they took the corner, a fat, ruddy-faced man in the backseat made a pistol with his hand, pointed his finger at Nick, and pulled an imaginary trigger. Pow.

Very late in the day they reached the Bucksport Trading Post, which had the look of a former stable, with a hitching post out front and window frames of wormy, untreated pine. Antlers rose above the front door. A nonfunctional Coke machine from the forties collected dust on the board porch. The dirt lot was empty, a chain hung across the entrance. A white sheet had been draped over the chain, words slapped on in black paint:

ALL HEALTHY HERE SICK GO ON

But a folding table had been set up on their side of the rusty, swinging chain. Set upon it were paper bowls of chicken noodle soup. Paper cups of water had been arranged in a row.

The smell of the soup was enough to get Harper’s saliva glands working and her stomach tightening with hunger, but that wasn’t what really excited her. Set out on one corner of the table was a bottle of some kind of pink syrup and a little plastic syringe. It was the sort of syringe you might use to orally administer medicine to a dog or a small child. The label on the bottle said
erythromycin
and gave a dosage for someone named Lucky. It had expired over a year ago and was only half full, the outside of the bottle tacky with dried syrup. Pinned beneath the bottle was a ruled sheet of notebook paper:

heard you are with invalid will this help?

Harper took the bottle in one hand and peered up at the Bucksport Trading Post. A black man in a flannel shirt, with gold spectacles resting on the end of his nose, peered back from behind a window crowded with knickknacks: a carved wooden moose, a lamp with a driftwood base. Harper lifted a hand in a gesture of thanks. He nodded, his glasses flashing, and retreated into dimness.

She gave John his first dose, squirting it into the back of his mouth, and followed with aspirin, while the others sat on the side of the road, tipping their paper bowls to their mouths to drink lukewarm soup.

An orange
detour for sick
sign pointed them west, along a winding country road, away from the town of Bucksport itself. But they paused at a wooden sawhorse (
sick do not cross
) to peer along a lane that led into town and down toward the sea. The street was shaded with big leafy oaks and lined with two- and three-story colonials. It was late in the day and Harper could see lights on in the houses—electric lights—and a streetlamp casting a steely blue glow.

“My God,” Renée said. “We’re back in a part of the world that has power.”

“No, we aren’t,” Allie told her. “That part of the world is on the other side of this sawhorse. What do you think would happen if we tried to cross?”

“I don’t know, and we’re not going to find out. We’re going to follow the signs and do what we’re told,” Harper said.

“Walk right this way,” Allie said. “Up the ramp and into the slaughterhouse. Single file, please. No shoving.”

“If they wanted to kill us, they’ve had plenty of opportunities,” Renée noted.

“Never mind me,” Allie said. “I’m just your typical jaded teenage leper.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins
Publishers

....................................

27

They spent the night in a public campground that had been marked specifically for the use of the infected. The dirt road in was flanked by a pair of enormous wooden heads, carved to look like noble Indian chieftains, complete with sad wise eyes and feathered headdresses. Hung above the entrance was a banner that proclaimed
sick stay here water food toilets
.

They slept under picnic tables, rain plopping on the wooden planks and dripping down on top of them. But there were port-a-potties, an inconceivable luxury after over a week of using rags to wipe, and John surprised Harper by sleeping through the night, his chest rising and falling deeply and his lean, lined face set in an expression of dreaming calm. He woke just once, when she put the syringe in his mouth to give him another squirt of the antibiotic, and even then he only made a small sound, an amused sort of snort, and slipped away again.

They stayed in the campground most of the morning, waiting for the rain to pass. It quit around lunch and the afternoon was fine for walking. A cool breeze shushed in the big-leafed oaks. The daylight glittered on every wet surface, made spiderwebs into nets studded with diamonds.

They followed
this way sick
signs north and east—mostly north—past forest and lake. Once they passed a folding table by the side of the road where someone had set out a bowl filled with individually wrapped Oreo cookies, a steel jug with blessedly cold milk in it, and Dixie cups. There were no houses in sight. The table stood alone at the end of a dirt lane that led back into trees.

“This is fresh,” Harper said. She shut her eyes to savor an icy swallow. “It can’t have been sitting outside for long.”

“No. ’Course not. They know we’re coming,” the Fireman croaked from his stretcher.

Harper almost coughed milk up her nose.

In the next moment they were all on their knees around the travois. John looked at them from half-shut eyes, his chin bristly and his cheeks caved in from all the weight he had lost. His color was ghastly. His smile was fond but weak.

“I wouldn’t say no to some of that milk myself, Nurse Willowes,” he said. “If it won’t interfere with my recovery.”

“Not at all. But I want you to take some aspirin with it.”

She put a hand behind his head, propping it up, and gave him slow sips from her own cup. She didn’t say a thing. For the next ten minutes, Allie and Renée were talking over each other while Nick gestured furiously with his hands, all of them trying to tell the story of the last week and a half at the same time. The Fireman looked this way and that and nodded sometimes, making a drowsy effort to attend to each of them. Harper wasn’t sure how much he was getting, although his brow furrowed when Allie told him they had left Bucksport behind that morning.

“The four of you carried me all the way to Bucksport?”

“No,” Harper said. “Just Allie.”

“Lucky your bony English ass is light,” Allie said.

“Lucky you don’t know how to quit,” John said to her. “Lucky for me. Thank you, Allie. I love you, girl.”

Allie wasn’t good at the emotional stuff. She looked away into the trees, clenching her jaw and clamping down on some intense upswell of feeling.

“Try not to get nearly killed again,” she said, when she was able to speak.

They all seemed to run out of things to say at the same time, and then there was a pleasant silence, no sound except for the swish of the cool wind in the trees and the twittering of the birds. Harper found herself holding John’s hand.

“Perhaps we can procure me a crutch,” he said. “Or fashion one. I wouldn’t like to burden you all any longer.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,” Harper said. “Yesterday this time, I wasn’t sure you’d live to see another morning.”

“That bad?”

“Buddy,” Harper said, “I thought you were smoked.”

“Ha ha,” he said. “Good one, Willowes.”